On Japanese Twitter I saw a lot of tweets ending with「なう」— a grammar structure I wasn't familiar with. Only it looked a lot like 'now' in Hiragana. But it couldn't be that easy, could it…
Turns out that yes, that's exactly what it is: a compact way to indicate something happening presently. It can be used with a noun or a verb, like 'coffee now'「コーヒーなう」or 'eating ramen' 「ラーメン食ってるなう」. It's not proper Japanese though, of course.
If you speak the language, here's a thorough explanation: twitterの「なう」の意味と使い方.
Quite annoyingly after the computer goes to sleep and wakes up again, some applications have trouble recognising the built-in camera. Up until now I resorted to rebooting the Air, which is not that a big deal when you have an SSD, but still I wished I didn't have to. Turns out there is an easier solution: an application called VDCAssistant is reserving the camera in these cases, which is safe to be killed either from the Activity Monitor or by issuing:
From time to time I need to do simple jobs with videos, such as a container change. I used to use mencoder for that back on linux and I still think that the versatility of a command line tool is unparalleled by any GUI solution. So I set out to get FFmpeg on my Mac.
There is a static build available from the FFmpeg website, but I decided to take a somewhat more complicated approach and compile it from source myself.
To do so, one first needs Xcode, available from the Mac App Store. The current versions, however, do not contain the command line tools needed. A separate package called Command Line Tools needs to be installed from either navigating to the Downloads for Apple Developers site from Xcode by Xcode > Open Developer Tool > More Developer Tools... or using the built-in package manager at Xcode > Preferences... on the Downloads tab.
Two packages need to be installed separately first: LAME for mp3 encoding (compulsory) and FAAC for AAC (optional). The tar.gz files can be unpacked by, for example:
tar -xzvf faac-1.28.tar
Then enter their respective directories and issue:
./configure
make
sudo make install
Finally, check out the latest source code of FFmpeg:
Compile it with LAME and FAAC enabled (the latter only if it's installed). The --enable-nonfree switch is required by FAAC and I got an error unless I disabled Yasm.
./configure --enable-libmp3lame --enable-shared --enable-libfaac --enable-nonfree --disable-yasm
make
sudo make install
That's all, FFmpeg is ready to use:
Daenerys:Downloads sesam$ ffmpeg
ffmpeg version N-44141-g9de7622 Copyright (c) 2000-2012 the FFmpeg developers
built on Sep 4 2012 16:10:11 with llvm-gcc 4.2.1 (LLVM build 2336.11.00)
configuration: --enable-libmp3lame --enable-shared --enable-libfaac --enable-nonfree --disable-yasm
libavutil 51. 70.100 / 51. 70.100
libavcodec 54. 55.100 / 54. 55.100
libavformat 54. 25.104 / 54. 25.104
libavdevice 54. 2.100 / 54. 2.100
libavfilter 3. 15.103 / 3. 15.103
libswscale 2. 1.101 / 2. 1.101
libswresample 0. 15.100 / 0. 15.100
Hyper fast Audio and Video encoder
usage: ffmpeg [options] [[infile options] -i infile]... {[outfile options] outfile}...
Use -h to get full help or, even better, run 'man ffmpeg'
The freezes are often somewhat more graceful now with a kernel panic message and an automatic restart. After such an event a report is generated and sent to Apple. Not that I have illusions of them taking it seriously.
My very favourite band, The Gathering's 10th studio album will be available on 12 September. For 24 hours, however, on this day the whole album is free to stream and listen to on Bandcamp:
It was quite the ride, but this is something I've been a part of from the very start. It's insane to realise that something I worked on ended up to get a press release in San Francisco and then articles in TechCrunch, The Verge, Venture Beat or The Next Web.
TNW tested the app, finding it to be quick, and free from errors and lag.
